Apple to Ship Mac OS X Leopard on October 26 — Apple® today announced that Mac OS® X Leopard will go on sale Friday, October 26 at 6:00 p.m. at Apple's retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers, and that Apple's online store is now accepting pre-orders.

Leopard: final features and further upgrade details — We got a chance this morning to pose a few queries to Brian Croll, Senior Director of Mac OS X Product Marketing, about today's Leopard release announcement. Here's some of what he had to say, as well as some of the new features we're looking forward to in the next release.

Leopard release: October 26th — If you're one of the many speculating the release date for Apple's next version of OS X, Leopard, you can tick the other 10 of the remaining 11 business days left on the October calendar because it's finally official: Mac OS 10.5 launches Friday …

Exciting Announcements at eMetrics Today — Today at the eMetrics Summit in Washington, D.C. Brett Crosby announced several Google Analytics features that will be rolled out over the coming weeks. Here's a rundown. — First, you'll be able to use Google Analytics to track site search activity.

Will Apple Open the iPhone? — An official software-development kit may finally be announced at January's Macworld. Why the wait? It may have something to do with Leopard — William Hurley loves his iPhone. But he'd love it even more if he could write software for it. — He's not alone.

S60 Touch Interface Launched — Today at the Symbian Smartphone Show Nokia showed S60 running with a touch interface. The touch interface will support both finger and stylus input, has full multi lingual support, has support for tactile feedback (haptics) and is backwardly compatible with the existing S60 platform.

The Social Media Marketing KISS — We all know what the KISS acronym stands for: keep it simple, stupid. In this article I want to talk about how this applies to creating content for social media marketing, namely linkbait. — You see, users from social news sites have very short attention spans while browsing these sites.

VIDEO-SHARING WEB SITE GOES HIGH-DEF — User-generated videos are going high-def. — Vimeo, a nascent video-sharing Web site owned by Barry Diller's IAC, is expected to announce this week that it will begin distributing videos with a resolution of 1280 pixels by 720 pixels, the standard for high-definition.

BBC 'must offer iPlayer for all' — The BBC must deliver an online TV catch-up service that lets users of all computers download programmes, the corporation's regulators have said. — It comes after the BBC said a download service for Mac and Linux users was not 100% definite and would depend on cost.

The Techmeme pile-on — good or bad? — Tim O'Reilly has a great post up on O'Reilly Radar, in which he talks about what might be called (although he doesn't use the term) the "stupidity of crowds." Using the meltdown in quantitative hedge funds, Facebook apps and Techmeme.com as examples …

Yahoo: Bringing Geeky Back — Under CEO Jerry Yang's direction, the Web portal is trying to return to its tech roots and shift away from being a media catch-all — From the outside, it might not look like much has changed at Yahoo! (YHOO) since Jerry Yang took the reins as chief executive in June.

On tap: Another Microsoft Communications launch — In San Francisco this morning, Microsoft is launching its latest foray into the market for "unified communications" — back-end server and desktop PC programs that let businesses combine phone, instant messaging, and e-mail functions with …